Imagine My Surprise
by sinnerforhire
Summary: Bend It Like Beckham Missing scenetakes place between the club and the trip back to England. Jess doesn't know why Jules is so mad at her, and, quite honestly, Jules doesn't either..


Disclaimer: I don't own this movie or either of these beautiful girls. More's the pity.  
  
"I can't believe you. I really can't bloody believe you. I thought you were my friend!"  
  
"I *am* your friend! I...I just...it wasn't what you think."  
  
"What was I supposed to think?" Jules's eyes were hard, far harder than Jess had ever seen them. Jess shivered; she wasn't sure if it was from the chilly night air or Jules's cold glare.  
  
"Look, nothing happened back there!" Jess grabbed Jules's arm, stopping her short on the dark sidewalk. "You have to believe me. I swear nothing happened."  
  
Jules pulled her arm away roughly. "You *kissed* him! I flaming saw you! That's not what I call nothing, now, innit?" She turned and stomped away.  
  
"Jules!" Frustrated, Jess ran her hands through her now-tangled hair. She pulled off the annoying high heels and ran down the sidewalk. "Bloody hell...Jules!"  
  
"Go on back to the club," Jules spat. "Go finish what you started. Go on and bloody ruin everything for all of us!"   
  
"Jules, please!" Tears burned sharply at the corners of Jess's eyes. Jules still didn't stop. "Shite!"  
  
Jules sat down hard on the cracked sidewalk, burying her face in her hands. Rivers of mascara and saline streaked down her pale cheeks. Nothing about this day was going right. She wanted only to fall into bed and forget it had ever happened, but how could she when Jess would be sleeping in the next bed?   
  
"Oh, sod it all," she whispered, jamming her palms into her eyes and hastily wiping away the tears. She knew she was being stupid, that she had been stupid all along. Joe didn't want her. Then again, she didn't want Joe, either. She wanted to want Joe; she had tried as hard as she could to want Joe. But in the end, she knew that it wasn't Joe that she wanted. She didn't know what was worse: that she had made a bleeding idiot of herself in front of Joe for making a scene, or that she had worked so hard to cover up the real problem that she had ended up making a bleeding idiot of herself in front of Jess.  
  
"Either way, I'm a bleeding idiot", she muttered under her breath. Here she was, crying alone on a deserted street in Germany at one o'clock in the morning because all of the deceit and denial and guilt had finally caught up to her and cost her her two best friends. "Bloody brilliant."  
  
If she were a bit drunker, she would have jumped up in the middle of the street and started singing "I want you to want me, I need you to need me," at the top of her tuneless voice. But she was neither pissed nor shameless enough to do it. So instead she just sat and cried and tried desperately not to think about the heartbroken look in Jess's gorgeous chocolate-brown eyes, or the pain etched on her sweet face. She couldn't think about how Jess's petal-soft lips must have felt to Joe, and how they would someday feel on hers--  
  
"Bloody hell!" She slammed her fist down on her knee. Why was this happening now? Things had been going so wonderfully well lately--even the loss hadn't dampened her spirits for long. But this...hell, if coaches were off-limits, teammates had to be bloody untouchable.   
  
But they weren't. Not when they jumped all over each other after a goal was scored. Not when they held hands on the goal line praying for a penalty kick to go in. Not when they asked, flat out asked, for a quick rub after a particularly grueling set of exercises. No, teammates were *very* touchable, and that right there was the flaming problem.   
  
Brilliant. Bloody brilliant.  
  
"Jules?" The soft voice came out of nowhere. "Jules, everyone's heading back now...got to get up early, our flight's at 9..."   
  
Jules slowly got to her feet, not realizing how long she had been sitting on the cold cement. She noticed that Jess's eyeliner was smudged, as though she too had been crying. *Good*, she couldn't help thinking. *Why shouldn't she be as bloody miserable as I am*?   
  
They trudged in silence back to the club entrance, where the rest of the girls and Joe had gathered to await the taxi. Joe half-smiled when he saw Jess, but he would barely meet Jules's eyes. Jules thought about it for a minute and found that she really didn't care that bloody much. She did care, though, that Jess took pains to make sure that she was sitting as far away from Jules as possible.  
  
Yes, she cared. She cared way too flaming much.  
  
And she didn't want to stop. 


End file.
